It seemed like an odd marriage, but the more administrators analyzed it, the pairing began to make sense. Lacrosse was a booming sport, and the Big East Conference appeared poised to prosper in it. So why not bring it to Wisconsin?

This was part of the thinking at Marquette in 2009, five months after more than 100,000 people had packed Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts during the championship weekend of the N.C.A.A. men’s lacrosse tournament, culminating with a thrilling victory by Syracuse over Cornell on ESPN.

Riding lacrosse’s wave of popularity, Marquette decided to fully invest in men’s and women’s programs, introducing locals to a sport so unfamiliar that the alumni magazine explained its rules and its history.

“The only lacrosse people are familiar with in Wisconsin is the city,” said Mike Broeker, Marquette’s deputy athletic director, referring to La Crosse, Wis. “And we still get some people that spell it that way.”

Six years later, there is debate about whether that wave of popularity has crashed. Attendance at the Final Four has dropped for seven consecutive years, even though the event circulates among the sport’s traditional hotbeds of Baltimore and Philadelphia, including the Division I men’s semifinals on Saturday in Philadelphia that will feature No. 1-seeded Notre Dame against No. 4 Denver and No. 6 Maryland against No. 19 Johns Hopkins. The championship is set for Monday.

But the decline in interest for the sport’s marquee event has puzzled coaches and administrators, because other vital signs look favorable. Lacrosse remains one of the few team sports consistently growing in popularity among children across the country. Since 2009, 92 new college programs have been established, seeping into new states like Arkansas, Mississippi, California and Michigan.

The disconnect is troubling enough that the N.C.A.A. has revamped its ticket pricing for this year’s event and begun to offer bargains on hotel packages. It has held off deciding where to stage the Final Four after 2016 and will consider bypassing N.F.L. stadiums in favor of smaller sites. There has been discussion about holding the annual event in one location, the way Omaha hosts the College Baseball World Series.

The concern, according to Phil Buttafuoco, executive director of the men’s lacrosse coaches association, is that lacrosse might face the same struggle as soccer has in the United States: It is adored by legions of children but has difficulty translating that into viewership at the higher levels.

“We’ve got to build the bridge for them,” Buttafuoco said, “to understand how great college lacrosse is.”

Steve Stenersen, the executive director of US Lacrosse — the national governing body that has invested more than $170 million in the sport since 1998 — spoke bullishly about lacrosse’s health during a telephone interview this week, noting that the number of people participating has tripled since 2000 to more than 770,000. According to statistics released this month by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, lacrosse and gymnastics are the only team sports to show growth among participants between ages 6 and 17 over the last five years.

The rate of growth in total participation has slowed considerably, from a peak of 16.7 percent in 2004 to 3.5 percent in 2014, but Stenersen said that was the byproduct of a larger base. Lacrosse continues to spread across the country, rapidly gaining popularity in states like California, Oregon, Washington and Florida.

Yet the shrinking buzz for the national title weekend has become the elephant in the room for the N.C.A.A. After packing more than 123,000 fans over three days in Baltimore in 2007, when the games returned to M&T Bank Stadium last year, a total of 78,234 fans passed through the turnstiles, a drop of more than 36 percent.

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Notre Dame players at the 2014 title game. Final Four attendance has dropped seven years in a row.CreditGail Burton/Associated Press

“The trend is disappointing,” said Terence Foy, editor in chief of Inside Lacrosse magazine. “Because, for so long, attendance at the Final Four was seen as such a symbol of growth and progress, as well as validation.”

Now, Foy said, there are other signs that validate lacrosse’s growth, but the attendance numbers keep sliding.

In June 2013, Buttafuoco formed a committee of coaches, administrators and business consultants to review the attendance downturn and pinpointed a number of factors: the economic slowdown; the proliferation of quality television broadcasts; and the cost of tickets and travel. Anthony Holman, the N.C.A.A.’s championship administrator for Division I lacrosse, said those issues have been addressed this year, particularly with the lower ticket prices.

“It’s absolutely a concern,” Holman said. “We’ve spent the last 18 months developing strategies and plans around how we can increase the attendance at the championship. But our No. 1 priority is the experience we can provide to our student-athletes.”

One of this year’s quarterfinals sites was, for the first time, Denver, a significant step toward having the championship weekend shed its Eastern Seaboard image, a potential benefit considering the sport’s westward expansion in the youth ranks and the success of the University of Denver, playing in its third consecutive Final Four, and Notre Dame.

Such a move would be celebrated at Marquette, where lacrosse is slowly trying to build support among fans and players. The team still uses a county park as its home field and an office-supply storage room as its equipment area.

But, at 10-6 this season, the Golden Eagles held their own on the field, and Broeker said he was paying closer attention to the strong youth participation numbers in neighboring states than to the Final Four attendance figures.

“If you’re trying to build a department for the future,” Broeker said, “and you want it to be successful in the long term, you want it to be representative of the kids that you’re recruiting.”

Buttafuoco has been among those urging caution about moving the Final Four site far from Interstate 95, pointing to the N.C.A.A.’s relocation of the men’s hockey tournament to Anaheim, Calif., in 1999, which he considered a blunder. He said that he would prefer the N.C.A.A. to focus on improving attendance at the more traditional sites.

“You have to be careful,” Buttafuoco said. “You have to understand what’s your end game in making that decision. Right now I think the N.C.A.A.’s end game is to regain the attendance numbers that they had.”

Stenersen said that he believed the reduced prices for tickets should help. As one of the few moneymaking championship events run by the N.C.A.A., lacrosse was being pushed out of families’ comfort zones.

“I think maybe they went a bit too far in terms of ratcheting up ticket prices and parking pass prices and pressuring host sites for financial return,” Stenersen said. “I think they realize that now.”

Foy, the Inside Lacrosse editor, has taken a longer view on the N.C.A.A.’s struggle.

“Lacrosse as a spectator sport is still a generation behind soccer, for example,” he said.

The 5-year-olds playing the sport now will not consider it the novelty it was 20 years ago, he said. They will think of lacrosse like any of the other major team sports.

“Waiting for those kids to grow up and fill the stands on their own is something that the sport is just going to have to wait out,” Foy said.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section D, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Even as the Popularity of Lacrosse Rises, the Final Four Fights a Decline. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe